Two wins since the summer break, two poles, and Lando Norris is still drawing a line under his own title defence. The last Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort should have been the moment the paddock started treating him as a threat. Norris spent Sunday evening explaining why it was not.
He is fourth in the standings on 159 points. Kimi Antonelli leads on 242. George Russell and Lewis Hamilton are locked on 183. Eighty-three points is a lot. It is also less than the 104-point hole Max Verstappen faced after this race last year, before he took the championship to the last lap in Abu Dhabi.
"I know I've just won two races in a row and two poles in a row, but at the minute I don't have the car I need to fight for a championship," Norris said. "And I know that's quite a big comment."
The comment sits on a specific weakness. McLaren now has the high-speed corners. Mercedes still has the slow ones. The next race is Monza on 6 September. Azerbaijan follows. Long straights, heavy braking, not much of the circuit where Norris's MCL40 can hide.
"We're very, very strong in high speed. The place we've improved the car the most is high-speed performance," he told Motorsport.com. "No one matches us in high speed."
The other half of the sentence is the problem. "My pace advantage to Mercedes in Turn 7, Turn 8 was crazy. But their advantage that they have to us in slow speed is also crazy. And therefore I don't have the confidence to say, yeah, I can easily fight for a championship for the rest of the season."
Andrea Stella was not matching that temperature. "I think if we can confirm our improvements in Monza then... yes, we can look with some optimism of the remainder of the season," McLaren's team principal said.
On the driver, he was already there. "I think Lando is driving and operating at very high level, in absolute sense, in relation to [being] Formula 1 World Champion," Stella said. "I think he's driving at the level of a World Champion and like I always say for Lando, what I like the most of his journey in Formula 1 is that he keeps improving." He also pointed out that the weekend "was nowhere near a weekend in which we could fight for the victory... after having seen the performance in the Sprint," where rear-tyre degradation cost Norris places.
Antonelli, who finished second, did not bother with the same hedging. "Now as a team we need to find a little bit of time because McLaren have done a huge step," he said. Mercedes last brought a significant upgrade in Canada and is not expected to bring another before the overseas races start in Bahrain, four races away. Antonelli also takes a grid penalty at home in Italy.
Edd Straw of The Race put Norris first of the 22 drivers for the weekend: "Probably his best grand prix win capped a strong weekend." The margin came from hard-tyre pace Oscar Piastri never found - Straw's verdict on the other McLaren was "Lacked a little compared to Norris, and a lot when on the hard Pirellis."
Norris is not interested in the narrative. "I mean, it sounds boring, but one race at a time," he said in the post-race press conference. "There's no point thinking that far ahead. [...] I think there's still plenty of things we can do better, and we need to do better if we want to fight for a championship."
Monza is where that sentence gets tested.